


Front Enclosure

by somekindofseizure



Category: The Fall (TV 2013), The X-Files
Genre: F/F, bra shopping
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-24
Updated: 2017-01-24
Packaged: 2018-09-19 15:51:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,030
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9448904
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/somekindofseizure/pseuds/somekindofseizure





	

“Dammit,” Scully seethes as she looks down the freckled plane of her chest, angling the trajectory of her resentment not so much at her body as the thin, lavender, sloping piece of fabric strapped around it.

She tosses the bra into a pile of other rejects – mostly black, simple, lightly padded, boastful of their ability to expertly handle the apparently very specialized and complicated garment of a fucking t-shirt.  All bras should look good under a t-shirt, she thinks.  That’s what people wear.  She’s had it with this shop, this day, this whole fucking task of clothing a body nobody ever touches but her.   

The mound of scrapped items is daunting – the hook and eye systems tangled in the loops and scalloping of one another, cups flopped and twisted inside out at their junctures. It’ll take her an hour to get everything back on the hangers and she still hasn’t found a bra that fits properly, doesn’t itch or poke, doesn’t make her look like she’s hung someone else’s boobs on her frame. 

“Do you need help in there?” comes a voice – female, smooth as the thick pink satin of Contestant Number 3.

“Uh…”

Scully typically rejects all offers of loyalty and friendship from shop clerks, feeling proudly stoic each time she thanks-but-no-thanks-them.  But she feels out of her element here, desperate not to fail at the simple task of replacing her everyday undergarments.  “You know what?  Yeah, one second.”

She grabs her pearly-buttoned blue cardigan and slips it on over her bare winter skin, holding it shut beneath folded arms as she pushes the black velvet curtain to the side.  It’s heavier than she would have expected, as if a native well-rooted weed rather than a ham-fisted gimmick to get you to buy shit.   _This luxury is the natural geography of my biome, you’re the fool who wandered into it._  

The woman on the other side of the curtain catches Scully by surprise.  She hadn’t taken much notice of the girl who showed her to the dressing room, but she would have noticed this, even as preoccupied as she was with ABCs and numbers in even intervals. 

“I’m good at this,” the woman says.  Well-cut trousers, four-inch heels in leather so authentically Italian Scully can smell it five feet and three inches off the ground.  The woman is quiet as Scully looks her over, waits as Scully draws her own conclusions, seems satisfied when she realizes that nothing must be said aloud – this woman does not work here. 

The woman picks up Scully’s tangled pile of bras gently, cradling them one by one or two by two in her elbow like a baby, unmooring one from another with her manicured fingers. As the woman bends over, Scully can’t help but notice the perfectly rounded cleavage visible beneath the violated-V-shape of her blouse, the fullness of her breasts blooming from the garment rather than escaping its clutches.  She’s right.  She’s good at this.   

Scully wonders if it’s a British thing. 

“Don’t be embarrassed. I didn’t get the hang of it ‘til my forties.  I don’t want you to spend all day in here and go home with nothing.” 

Scully almost pulls the woman into a war-torn embrace to tell her how close to that exact scenario she’d just been.  But instead, she studies the glossy spread of her lips, the way they seem both soft and thickly textured, almost pebbled. 

“Stella,” the woman says, glancing up as she lays the untangled mass of lingerie on the velvet pouf.

“Dana.”

“What do you want, Dana?”

 _Oh, I don’t know… A bra, a chocolate donut without sprinkles, a puppy, an orgasm, a future._  

“Comfortable.  Effective. Like yours.”  She blushes as soon as she says it but Stella’s mouth turns up at its right corner.  Scully rushes to defend herself.  “You bent down.”

“I’m the one who interloped on a stranger’s intimate experience of underwear shopping,” Stella says by way of exculpation, or maybe by way of warning.  Scully wonders just how intimate this is about to get.  Stella reaches past Scully and takes the soft tape measure draped over a curvy white hook and turns Scully to face the mirror, holding the strip of numbers in a straight line behind her.  “Arms up,” she says.

Scully does as she’s told without argument, and something about Stella’s bossy demeanor, her own compliance, reminds her of her daily routine.  But in the end, this act, with its jasmine-scented perfume and round imperial tones, bears no semblance to the one she does with Mulder.  Her cardigan drapes open, exposing the very inside edges of her breasts, the flat – and if she doesn’t say so herself, rather toned – skin cinched at her belly button.  She tries not to feel immodest.  Stella’s just a woman, after all, and she is in fact the one who offered. 

Stella wraps the tape measure around Scully’s back just under her armpits, matching the tip to a number she takes note of, then lowers it a few inches so that it’s level with the tips of Scully’s nipples.  Scully doesn’t bother to ask her correct size.  In fact, she hopes she never has to see a two digit number in its thirties again.  Stella hums and seeming to have pulled too tightly for her own interest, loosens the ribbon, giving it slack as she wraps it again.

“You want to make sure you don’t cut yourself short on this particular measurement.  You need to capture them at their fullest.” 

Scully’s nipples harden, a combination of dressing room temperature and the soft, whispery touch of the leather ribbon on the other side of Scully’s sweater.  The very faint but unmistakable sensation of the beveled edge of a nail brushes pert point through thick fabric.  The ribbon swishes past.  Scully’s lungs freeze, her panties dampen such that she considers buying a replacement pair and changing, but Stella is just reading the number. 

“Sorry,” she murmurs, having somehow noticed one or the other reaction.

She takes one final measurement, wrapping the tape measure slowly a few inches below its last spot, sneaking it into the warm creases under Scully’s breasts.  Scully lifts her arms a little higher to allow for better access and watches in the mirror.  Her hair has fallen over one side of her face, her sweater has opened far enough that with a sneeze, her nipples would be exposed, a day of shopping turned into a pin-up photo session.  But somehow none of this seems to bother her as it might have ten minutes ago.

“I noticed you didn’t say sexy,” Stella says and looks in the mirror as she waits for a response, collecting up the tape measure in one fist.  

“Of course you’re sexy,” Scully almost says, without even questioning why Stella would be expecting the compliment.   It takes her a moment to realize Stella’s referring to Scully’s earlier declaration - the qualities she was seeking in a bra. 

“I work in law enforcement,” Scully says. 

“So do I.”  

Scully is so surprised to hear this that she moves into that uncomfortable territory that other people inhabit so carelessly – the questioning of the limits of coincidence, the embrace of its nemeses fate and destiny.

“Well, maybe a little sexy is okay,” Scully yields.  “Though it’ll really only be for me.”  She regrets the self-judgment in her voice when she talks about her love life.  It is her choice that she’s not having sex, and she doesn’t know why she sometimes pretends not to know that, why she mugs for pity even from herself.  She knows exactly what she’s doing when she daily glues herself to a chair opposite a man whose passion is reserved for things whose existence he can question, not things that make themselves resolutely, plainly present in chairs opposite him.

“You’re enough,” Stella says as she disappears a moment.  She reaches into the dressing room across the way and reappears, handing Scully a few things.  

“Though it would be nice to share,” she adds in a slow, syrupy drawl.  If Scully missed the suggestiveness in the first half of the remark, she doesn’t miss it in the second.  

Scully looks at the bras on the delicate hangers before her, all lovely, maybe slightly sexier than she would have chosen. 

“They go underneath things,” Stella says, reading her mind.  “We’re the same size.  Just try.” She turns her back but doesn’t leave as Scully takes one of the bras – black lace and ballet pink silk with a matching bow at the center – and scrambles it around her waist and then up onto her body.  

“Put the sweater on over it, so you can tell,” Stella commands and Scully obeys. Her boobs look absolutely perfect in this one, but she doesn’t know how to say this to Stella in a way that pays Stella the compliment rather than her body.

“Okay,” she says brightly, hopefully, and takes it off, looking at the others Stella placed on the hook. 

“You liked this front-closure one?” she asks.  The strip up the back is a T-shaped piece of lace, the cups a simple satin almost the exact color of her skin, the center clasp a shiny, firm silver.  She has never felt entitled to own one of these, not knowing the exact point of them.

“Didn’t give quite the oomph I like, but you’re young enough.  Those can be very nice presentationally,” Stella says, leaving Scully to wonder what exactly that means.  Scully slings the bra over her shoulders and reaches behind her for the unpadded, unlined cups, fitting the wire beneath her breasts, but the elastic seems to take the clasp just out of her reach each time.  Scully battles with it quietly, hoping not to stir the air between herself and Stella three inches away.

“They have to be really stretchy to be effective,” Stella says.

She turns slowly and looks for Scully’s face in the mirror to confirm permission.  Scully could just give it to her, but instead she holds Stella’s eyes there because she likes it, because they’re almost purple in this light, because they make her feel warm and bold, bare-chested before a stranger.  Stella’s eyes drop a bit, her shimmery eyeshadow glinting as she does so, and she takes the two ends of the bra in hand.  Her own chest presses into Scully’s back, her lower abdomen into the slope of Scully’s tailbone – she is three or four inches taller in those shoes, Scully surmises, but would not be so barefoot.

Scully holds her arms up again, a limp and wanton outing by comparison to the first - a willing participant in a game of tag rather than a soldier in basic training. Stella pulls the bra to cover Scully’s breasts, pushing them delicately with her inner wrists up and to the center, then letting them drop into the architecture of the underwire.  When she has everything where she wants it, she begins to pin the metal clasp to Scully’s sternum, the solar plexus, the place of light and heat.  Scully lowers her hands with soft elbows, spreads the webbing of her fingers, gripping the fronts of her thighs to resist gripping anything else.  

“Presentationally?” Scully asks.

Stella deftly peels the bra away from Scully’s body halfway, holding her tits in place with her inner forearms, perfect lad-magazine placement, as she nearly reveals Scully’s pliant, eager nipples.  A striptease.

“Presentationally,” Stella says.

And then the soft rippling edges of her palm-heels press into the sides of Scully’s flesh through the material of the unassuming racerback.  Stella’s strong, gentle hands nearly cup the whole of Scully’s breasts as the enclosure chirps shut over Scully’s rapidly beating heart.  And, finished, or just starting, Stella places her hands on Scully’s waist, pinkies drifting over her hipbones like they’re the handles of painted antique teacups.

“Perfect fit,” Stella says and Scully’s eyes travel over her body to Stella’s reflection.  In passing, she notes the greedy, raucous shade of violet her own eyes have turned.  Her voice retreats to a whisper so as to not draw any attention to this mirrored sliver of space that currently belongs to them.

“Yes.  It is.”


End file.
